if you're watching this video you might be an older adult with some arthritis in your hands and you're wondering will I ever be able to play the guitar I know arthritis can be very painful my dad suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and I know he has his good days and he has his bad days but I do have some good news for you I do specialize in working with older adults and a lot of my students do suffer with various forms of arthritis and I think a key thing when you are an older adult whether you
have arthritis or not is to really ease your way into the guitar playing so I see a lot of teachers um when they teach beginner chords they a lot of times teach chords that use three or four fingers at a time now even if you don't have arthritis that is a very difficult thing to do in the beginning because your hands this is a whole new mechanic and you can't really move your hands as well okay and it'd be like me teaching you to ride a bike for for the first time it's going to be
clumsy it's going to be awkward so what I like to do with my students is I like to start by building up hand dexterity and strength which again for older adults is really important and a big thing with arthritis is is just getting the hands moving getting the fluid inside the joints moving and warming up so what I like to do with students is we'll start out with very very simple cords so instead of giving you like a three-fingered c chord I'll give you a two-fingered c chord you could even play a one-fingered C chord
if you needed an even easier version but what I will do is instead of instead of playing your c chord like this because this third finger is even if someone has a healthy hand this is quite a stretch and if you're not used to doing that it can be very painful and it can be very hard and I have a lot of students who never graduate to this three finger c chord it is literally just too painful for them to play but you know what they have fun playing music using the two-finger chord so they'll
use a two-fingered c chord A two-finger E minor chord A two-finger D chord and I showed them a two-finger G chord okay and they may never graduate from that but I've had number of students say you know I never thought I was going to be able to do this because it was too painful and you actually gave me an option that made it accessible to me and and sometimes you know I have a lot of students in my seven Level Guitar system in my private Community they're always asking me for suggestions and I had a
student who actually recommended this I knew nothing about these pics this is called a Black Mountain pick this is their uh super light so it's very good for strumming and you know I have a lot of students they have arthritis and their thumb all right and it can make it very hard to hold on to a guitar pick so I've had a lot of students are like Lauren I really can I strum using just my thumb because it hurts the answer is yes but the great thing about a pig is you'll get a lot more
sound and percussion out of it over time so I had a student who recommended these great picks they're called Black Mountain piics and you just put it over your thumb it's like a spring and you will never drop the pick okay you don't have to I'm trying to fling this thing off and it is not falling off so you do not have to hold on to the pick tightly all right and for a lot of people this is enough [Music] that's enough for some people to be like oh my God I can actually use a
pick because when you have arthritis in your thumb it can be very hard to press and hold the pick and I have a number of students that're like I can't hold the pick it's too painful and it falls out of my hand I say hey give this a try and if that doesn't work you can always just strum with the Flesh of your fingers okay I always tell people you can strum down with your thumb and then up with your index finger down with your thumb up with your index finger and if that works for
you great you may never use a pick on the guitar and that's totally fine I always tell students don't focus on what you can't do on the guitar focus on what you can do and you know maybe you're going to be a guitar player that that doesn't play chords I have one student and she had very bad arthritis and we could never play bar chords they were just they were too painful for her fortunately she could play open chords and if we had a song with a bar chord we would just use an easy fix
to a bar chord so instead of playing an F Bar chord we would play an F major 7 chord all right or we played some sort of like open B minor chord okay so this way she didn't have to Bar because it was it was too painful with her arthritis she just couldn't do it I said it's not the end of the world we can always fix it we can always use a capo to try and get rid of bar chords where needed so it just goes to show you you know if you are someone
that suffers from arthritis and you want want to learn the guitar it's totally possible you just have to find a teacher that's willing to work with you that's willing to go outside of the norm you know everyone yells at me on YouTube like a c chord has to be played this way and it's like a c chord does not have to be played this way there are many many different ways to play a C chord on the guitar traditionally when we teach beginners yes we teach them the C chord this way we teach them the
G chord like this or the G chord with the pinky traditionally what happens when I have a student who doesn't have a ring finger you know I've had students like I'm missing my index finger what do I do and it's like okay well yeah no you're not going to play your c chord like this because you don't have an index finger you might have to play it like this and it's going to be really awkward in the beginning but because you don't have access to this finger this is how you're going to train your hand
to play the guitar so whenever you're learning just keep an open mind that you know there's a possibility that there is a different way to do this there might be an easier way to do this and if you ever have pain while playing the guitar stop you never never want to play through pain because that's just going to aggravate the arthritis that's going to aggravate the inflammation you know I had a lot of students who said something that was very helpful was warming up their hands with like a ham warmer you know getting a heating
pad and putting their hands and warming up even just getting the hands moving doing this before you play cuz I know know if you're having a bad day your hands can be really stiff and feel really really tight you know like I said my dad has arthritis and sometimes he can barely move his hands sometimes he can barely get out of bed so I know you can have good days and I know you can have bad days so just even sometimes doing this and getting the blood flow going and getting the joints moving before you
even touch the guitar can be super helpful for warming up and getting yourself prepared and don't jump into the hard things right right away okay so if you're just getting started learn a one-fingered c chord then a two-fingered c chord and then a three-fingered c chord okay don't jump into this right away it's going to be too hard it's going to be frustrating and you're going to want to give up and throw the guitar back in the closet and that's not what we want our goal as teachers is to help you accomplish your goals with
you know whatever you can do okay again like I said you might not play chords but maybe you're going to play Le guitar instead okay cuz maybe you can just play single notes and that's all you're going to be able to do and there's nothing wrong with that you could play melody lines to songs okay have a number of different lessons on the pentatonic scale and maybe that's the route you're going to go maybe you're going to go instead of becoming the strumming guitar player maybe you're going to become the lead guitar player and there's
nothing wrong with that another tip for older adults is the acoustic guitar is much harder to play in terms of strength needed something like this this PRS hollow body here um so this is a hollow body guitar okay so it's hollow inside and the string layout is more of an electric guitar so the strings are a little bit thinner they're easy to press and electric guitars in general do tend to be much easier from a strength positioning to play so if you're someone who really really wants to play guitar and you're an older learner maybe
get something that's more of an El guitar style okay you don't have to get a full what we call a solid Body Electric where it's full it's wood all inside because even for me I find solid body electric guitars very heavy and they hurt my shoulder a lot okay I'm a very small person I'm only about 5'4 um so I do not like a heavy less paw style guitar I would much rather get something like this that's Hollow you can see there's an opening here and I can put my hand inside so it's Hollow so
it has a lot less weight so this hollow body guitar isn't that much heavier than my acoustic and the great thing about these so this is a special model from PRS um that has a special pickup um that you can play it more like an acoustic which is nice so this is the SE hollow body 2 um the pho version so there's two inputs all right one is more for if you want those electric guitar sounds um the other input is more if you want to sound like an acoustic so it just goes to show
you there are options out there for different guitars that can act make things easier for you to play so if you're someone that suffers from arthritis or an older learner there is hope do not give up and if you're looking for a system that is designed specifically with older adults in mind I highly recommend you go check out my seven Level Guitar system we take things from absolute beginner to kind of that late beginner phase and we take it step by step all right we're not going to throw you into really hard difficult things at
first I really work on getting finger dexterity the coordination down because you can't get faster chord changes if your hands are not fast or your fingers aren't Nimble so we really need to work and focus on that in the beginning and that's what I do in my course and I teach you all the skills you need to play the songs that you know and love so if you're an older adult and you're looking for a system a stepbystep system YouTube's great but you're kind of all over the place here okay I love YouTube but if
you want things in a stepbystep order I highly recommend you go check out my seven Level Guitar system I'll put a link in the description below and I hope to see you in a lesson video real soon
